Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze

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Portrait of M. et Mme Lavoisier, by Jacques-Louis David, 1788 (Metropolitan Museum)

Madame Lavoisier while assisting her husband on his scientific research of human respiration, she is visible at the table on the far right.

Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze (1758-1836) was the wife and collaborator of Antoine Lavoisier, an eighteenth-century French nobleman and scientist, both a geologist and sometimes called "the father of modern chemistry". The daughter of one of Lavoisier's co-owners of the Ferme Générale that collected taxes for the Crown, she married him when she was only thirteen in 1771 (Lavoisier was about 28).

Her accomplishments include translating Richard Kirwan's Essay on Phlogiston from English to French, to help her husband prepare detailed rebuttals to each section and his French contemparies dispute his ideas. She took lessons from David, who painted the joint portrait evocative of the Lavoisiers' partnership (illustration) in 1788; she also made many sketches and engravings of lab instruments of the period, including all the illustrations in her husband's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elementary Treatise of Chemistry, 1789)

After Lavoisier fell victim to the guillotine at the height of the Terror regime during the French Revolution, in May 1794. Mme Lavoisier continued to preside over a salon of scientists and amateurs, while the philosophic statesman Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, friend of Thomas Jefferson, courted her in vain. In 1805 she married the American physicist Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) and in the brief time they were together they published Lavoisier's Mémoires de physique et de chimie, in large part edited by Armand Séguin (Paris 1805). This marriage was not happy — he apparently married her for her money — and they separated four years later.